CERN vs Science Scares

I was reading the latest issue of Symmetry Magazine when an article caught my eye. This is a publication that presents news from Physics in layman’s language, written by SLAC National Lab (where I spent 25 years) and its sister lab Fermilab. In the article, the former director of communications at CERN reminisced about the challenges of explaining the science that they do, especially in the face of public misconceptions.

There was, of course, the furor over turning on the LHC, because the possibility that the intense beams could create microscopic black holes had morphed into the fear that the machine would create a black hole that would consume the entire earth. Even if quantum black holes had been created, they would have evaporated almost instantly. So far, none have been detected. CERN addressed the public fear by inviting the press into the control room to view the machine’s startup, changing it from a scary event hidden deep underground to a media event like a moon launch. You’ll never win over everyone, but it did sway public and government opinion enough to head off demands that the startup be halted. A win for openness and education.

Then there was Dan Brown’s terrible early novel Angels and Demons. It justifiably got little traction on its initial release but then became better known upon the publication of his more famous The Da Vinci Code. It was a decent enough thriller, I suppose, even with Brown’s penchant for wielding the English language like a blunt instrument. Its real sin was a lack of homework about its subject matter. CERN was depicted as a campus of stately brick buildings where scientists floated on air columns for recreation. In reality, it’s a city of very functional, fairly industrial buildings. Needless to say, it neither owns a space plane nor does it produce anywhere near the amount of antimatter required for the book. The communications department again responded with an educational website to capitalize on the attention and then helped the movie producers get the lab’s portrayal a lot more accurate. The movie still required a quarter gram of anitmatter, which would take CERN about 250 million years to produce, but we’ll let that slide.

It’s a good reminder that humor and education can do a lot more to remedy misinformation than outright denial. It’s a great article and I recommend that you read it if you have time.